Optical potential from first principles

TL;DR

This paper presents a first-principles method to derive microscopic optical potentials for nucleon-nucleus scattering using chiral interactions, Green's functions, and coupled-cluster techniques, with a focus on neutron scattering on oxygen-16.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining Green's functions and coupled-cluster methods with complex energy basis to compute optical potentials from fundamental interactions.

Findings

Converged optical potentials and phase shifts with respect to model space.

Negligible low-energy absorption due to limited correlations in the coupled-cluster approximation.

Most excited states of oxygen-16 are dominated by two-particle-two-hole configurations.

Abstract

We develop a method to construct a microscopic optical potential from chiral interactions for nucleon-nucleus scattering. The optical potential is constructed by combining the Green's function approach with the coupled-cluster method. To deal with the poles of the Green's function along the real energy axis we employ a Berggren basis in the complex energy plane combined with the Lanczos method. Using this approach, we perform a proof-of-principle calculation of the optical potential for the elastic neutron scattering on $^{16}{\rm O}$. For the computation of the ground-state of $^{16}{\rm O}$, we use the coupled-cluster method in the singles-and-doubles approximation, while for the $A=\pm 1$ nuclei we use particle-attached/removed equation-of-motion method truncated at two-particle-one-hole and one-particle-two-hole excitations, respectively. We verify the convergence of the optical potential and scattering phase shifts with respect to the model-space size and the number of discretized complex continuum states. We also investigate the absorptive component of the optical potential (which reflects the opening of inelastic channels) by computing its imaginary volume integral and find an almost negligible absorptive component at low-energies. To shed light on this result, we computed excited states of $^{16}{\rm O}$ using equation-of-motion coupled-cluster method with singles-and-doubles excitations and we found no low-lying excited states below 10~MeV. Furthermore, most excited states have a dominant two-particle-two-hole component, making higher-order particle-hole excitations necessary to achieve a precise description of these core-excited states. We conclude that the reduced absorption at low-energies can be attributed to the lack of correlations coming from the low-order cluster truncation in the employed coupled-cluster method.